Tag Archives: Perry Anderson

The Indian Ideology is three essays (titled “Independence,” “Partition,” and “Republic”) by UCLA historian Perry Anderson, originally published in 2012 in the London Review of Books, collected and published in book form by Verso in the UK and US and Three Essays Collective in India. It’s exactly the sort of thing one never expects to find published in India at all, which is part of what makes it so bracing. It could have been written only by an outsider; no Indian would write such a book.

My strong and longstanding interest in Pakistan prompted me to read the second of the three essays, “Partition,” when I first noticed it in the LRB. The Congress Party, writes Anderson,

had accepted Partition as the price of a strong centralized state in which it could be sure of a monopoly of power, but in the mind of its top leaders it was a temporary concession. The party’s resolution of June 5, 1947 that formally agreed to partition made its position very clear. “Geography and mountains and the sea fashioned India as she is, and no human agency can change that shape or come in the way of her final destiny” – least of all “the false doctrine of two nations.” Mountbatten had engineered point-blank Partition with the same end in mind, saying explicitly that this would “give Pakistan a greater chance to fail on its demerits,” and so was in the best interests of India, because a “truncated Pakistan, if conceded now, was bound to come back later. … The delusions of the Congress nationalism reshaped by Gandhi to Hindu specifications died hard.

I was so intrigued that I bought and read the whole book. It’s short but packs a wallop, explicitly and forthrightly challenging decades of cant shamelessly kowtowing to the presumptions of the Indian state that emerged from the struggle against British rule in 1947. Anderson’s incisive critique is especially timely given the current ascendancy of the assertive Hindutva ideology personified by new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat at the time of an infamous anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002. But Anderson makes clear that he considers the ostensibly secular Congress little moreso than Modi’s BJP.

The fictional character of India’s secularism is historically significant given the appalling situation in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which I saw for myself in the mid-1990s and wrote about extensively in the early chapters of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan. Kashmir is widely considered the crux of the chronic tension between India and Pakistan, but to assert that is either myopic or a subtle evasion; the real crux, per Anderson’s words quoted above, is the mere existence of Pakistan. Nehru, Mountbatten et al. did all they could circa 1947 to cripple Pakistan at birth, and 67 years later Pakistan – for all its severe and glaring flaws – still exists. And many Indians will never forgive it for that.

That said, the unresolved status of Kashmir, and above all the appalling suffering of ordinary Kashmiri people, deserves to be remembered and emphasized. Anderson does so, with characteristic candor:

There should be little need for any reminder of the fate of Kashmir, under the longest military occupation in the world. At its height, in the sixty years since it was taken by India, some 400,000 troops have been deployed to hold down a Valley population of five million – a far higher ratio of repression than in Palestine or Tibet. Demonstrations, strikes, riots, guerrillas, risings urban and rural, have all been beaten down with armed force. … The death toll, at a low reckoning, would be equivalent to the killing of four million people, were it India – more than double that, if higher estimates were accurate. Held fast by Nehru to prove that India was a secular state, Kashmir has demonstrated the exact opposite: a confessional expansionism.